Is there a future astronaut in your life? Or have you overdosed on the Hollywood version of space and want a reality check? Then download FREE posters, calendars, games and more from the NASA Mars Space Exploration Program.
It’s all pretty cool stuff, and all FREE.
NASA Mars Discoveries
The first NASA Mars missions were flybys, designed to take as many photos as possible. Then, between 1962 and 1973, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory designed and built 10 spacecraft named Mariner to explore our inner solar system, visiting the planets Venus, Mars and Mercury for the first time, and returning to Venus and Mars for additional close observations.
Want some inspiration? Download free Mars posters and games for kids and teens.
Future Mars Exploration
Future Mars missions will likely be designed to search for life on Mars in places that have been identified as potential past or present habitats. Like all Mars Exploration Program missions, future missions will be driven by rigorous scientific questions that continually evolve from discoveries by prior missions.
Technology development makes missions possible. Each Mars mission is part of a continuing chain of innovation: each relies on past missions for new technologies and contributes its own innovations to future missions.
There’s a lot more information on the NASA Mars website and more free stuff to download from the NASA Mars Exploration site, including a mobile app, printable calendars, coloring pages, fact sheets, brochures, and more. And on the main NASA website, there are even more free downloads, including E-Books and smartphone apps with a huge collection of the latest NASA content such as news, videos-on-demand, ringtones, and much, much more.
Seriously, what kid wouldn’t appreciate a boarding pass for a trip to Mars. And it’s FREE.
Thanks to Carole Cancler, who publishes and edits Seattle on the Cheap for this great tip. She’s a NASA wonk, since her dad was a Seattle Boeing engineer and worked on some of the earliest Mariner-Venus rockets.
As Carole tells it, he worked on the design that allowed the spacecraft to re-couple. Modules were launched together, but would separate and take pictures of different planets (Mars and Venus), then re-couple in space for another flyby somewhere else. It’s harder than you might think to get two spacecraft to not only find each other in the cosmos, but latch together, and then continue on as one.
She describes it as spacecraft sex in space, so-to-speak. The rest of us would just describe it as awesome.
Scotty, beam me up.
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